A derivé, on Situationists

6,00€

 I return to the ending location of my derivé, a bar and restaurant with 3,6 stars on Google Maps (which I wouldn't go to usually when navigating with Google review stars) but an exterior exactly to my liking. I've had an interest to tour bars off the trodden path, whether due to where they're situated or not being on the popular bar crawl list. The thirst for beers and "tuning one's hearing to the local bandwidth" have existed since I found http://ostarinhelmi.blogspot.com/, a blog that's been on an indeterminate break since 2007. It follows a blogger touring different suburban malls, detailing them and usually ending with a review of the local bar.

Drama at the counter, someone comes back, proving the barkeeper that they've been billed "in the morning due to the shit machine", showing their bank account. It ends in laughs and resolution. Receipts are shown and a new beer is bought with cash. 

I've decided to dedicate this post partly to a movement which is responsible for me being here and of inspiration for my attempts to combine geography, psychology and art into a shareable activity. 

Artists of the World, randomize!

At crossroads, an opening for a choice I've willingly given away.

To make this blog post, I've asked each individual present at the university course to give me a direction. This is my method to create a random path and distance me from my personal inclinations for an experiment in dérive. For a different experience, feel free to follow the directions given in any way that suits you while reading this post. 

Since our society has a propensity to pinpoint and attribute a lot to single personifications, usually in the "genius guy" archetype, "The Guy" of the movement, Guy Debord (who did publish A LOT, and very self-confidently) defines it like this in his Theory of the Dérive: 

"In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the

attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there."

 My first question question (hereafter Q) was left/right? 

                                                                    First answer: Left.

I end up in a brief afternoon rush, walking behind two other persons, with an adult and a child having just brushed past me before taking this picture. 

Next question: Up/down?

Up. 

I know the spatial surroundings well enough, that I instantly zoom for the stairwell leading up to the residential area of Merihaka. I do scan around just to be sure that nothing else rises around, but I'm right. 

       Our technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances is briefly altered by the red light.

 

While walking, I wonder which method I should use for documentation. I'm tempted to record the whole drifting but quickly run into problems of limited memory on phone, so I end up taking short clips.

I'm stepping to my next question: North or South? North.

There is only one way north; down.

"The spatial field of a dérive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself." Guy Debord, Theory of the Dérive, published in the Internationale Situationniste #2, 1958

Trying to navigate according to the directions, without my usual reasons for moving in familiar locations, having occasionally to go backwards to make the next step jolts me into a semi-confused state. On a journey which starting point is our campus, all directions are familiar, but the ways, order and reasons of moving are different and make me feel like a stranger, especially with my camera, I feel a need to "fit" in, wear a double layer of the "ordinary citizen" on his way somewhere he knows, just happening to forget the phone in hand on a busy day. Occasionally I pretend to just have missed some GPS direction. 

Screenshots of graffitis on the way down. Do the shapes of the stairs affect their style, and in turn my camera angle? It can be such a bodily art practice, with each movement, from hips to shoulder to elbow to the flick of the wrist affecting the result in combination with time sprayed and the form it's imposed on.

      You might just need one experience making graffiti to feel the images kinesthetic reverberations.

   The Guy of the movement. 

Northwards.

Question: R/L?

Answer: L

Upon a bridge I've walked many times, I get the impulse I regret as I start it, to record my dérive as a vlog.

https://youtu.be/sPh9-rI9vqk 

The ironic, not completely dedicated actor takes over (and yet very genuine, I feel vulnerable in a way I haven't in a long time sharing this). That's where my attention largely is for the rest of the trip. What I found immensely challenging, something vloggers often do, is being so open with the bypassing citizens, or in a bubble of their own, steadfast in their Vlog-universe. I usually end up looking around, silently whenever meeting fellow citizens.

Northeast or Southwest?

NE

Amongst the private property and high-rise office spaces it's hard to constantly follow a specific direction, so I end up taking turns at crossings when available. I end up on an inner yard that feels "imposing", towering heights, but doing a 360°, does offer a nice space to take breaths. 

Q: Continue or go back?

"if in the course of a dérive one takes a taxi, either to get to a specific destination or simply to move, say, twenty minutes to the west, one is concerned primarily with a personal trip outside one’s usual

surroundings. If, on the other hand, one sticks to the direct exploration of a particular terrain, one is concentrating primarily on research for a psychogeographical urbanism." Ibid.

Continue.

 "Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones."

Situationists were a strongly subversive, political marxist movement, against the status quo of the society and culture, on the prowl to create situations which could offer other ways to live. On a dérive, in terms of urban exploration and acting on the street, it offers a sensibility for where the currents of the urban landscape are and then having a choice of breaking the routine or consciously following it. 

Q: ↑ or ↓?

↓

Q: L/R?

R

Q: Go back or go on?

Go on.

Southeast or Northwest?

Northwest.

I end up by the prison. Active prisons within cities, on the rare occasion one meets them, offer an uneasy, anxious feeling; to be locked in, limited within such a small area, knowing the city bustle goes on so close, outside the walls. 

I revert to vlogging, this time with an even stronger character, emulating the stereotypical gestus of popular vloggers. I feel it to be slightly tasteless close to the prison, but that's an interesting part of vlogging too: being in spaces and combining them with your own brand for exposition. 

I'm reminded of a obnoxious, controversial blogger, Logan Paul, who made a stir by vlogging at the Aokigahara (commonly known in west as the Suicide forest) and showing a suicide victim on the video. 

I do some Chekhov exercises, reflecting later on that it might be interesting video content of an actor preparing, I go back to record a re-enaction of them the following day, also stopping by the bar which felt adequate with the situationist movement.

"It must be admitted that none of this is very clear. It is a completely typical drunken monologue, with its incomprehensible allusions and tiresome delivery. With its vain phrases that do not await response and its overbearing explanations. And its silences." - From the film Critique of Separation, Guy Debaurd

I'm still following my last order:

Go home.